The History of History (16 page)

At this, Margaret’s own chest narrowed. Perhaps there was nothing in the quotation that justified it, but for one moment, Margaret saw Hitler as young and soft and grasping and sentimental. And she did the arithmetic and figured that Hitler must have been twenty-five when he was on that train. This year, Margaret was also twenty-five.

So she saw herself there. And although to be like him was the opposite of goodness, and even the smell of it made her walk the house weak and bleary-eyed, without blood in her veins, not remembering to open the curtains in the morning or at any other time, afraid of all things light and springing, what could she do? The Nazi past was her encampment now, her nest, her burrow.

I
n mid-December, a cold fell over the city. Much to everyone’s surprise—for it was uncommon in this part of the country and at this time of year—Berlin fell under a thick layer of ice. Temperatures dropped to twenty below zero, and people, streets, trees, and buildings shriveled into muted silhouettes of themselves. It was so freezing that Margaret didn’t know whether her flesh city was still living; the buildings had frozen, had become one with the sandy ground, indistinguishable from stone.

On the coldest of these cold days, Margaret was assigned to give a tour of the concentration camp memorial of Sachsenhausen. Surprisingly, given the weather, eighteen people booked places for the excursion. In the regional express train shuttling north of the city to the little town of Oranienburg where Sachsenhausen spreads its sad cloud, Margaret looked out the window, her eyes slack over the dead plains around Berlin. The open expanses of winter fields were punctuated by bails of hay tightly wrapped in plastic. In the morning light, their frost-covered surfaces smoked like glass, dull with the secret of cold.

She thought of Magda, and then of Minnebie, whom she had pictured in her mind as looking something like herself. The collapse of Magda into Minnebie into Margaret was not an unpleasant sensation. The sense of camaraderie since the hawk-woman had come and Margaret had begun to read
Mein Kampf
was familiar to her: a sense of sure-footedness, of buttressing, of walking with a phalanx.

Whence did she know it? She racked her mind. She knew it from early childhood. To be dependent on others without resentment—what a sweet time.

She thought back on her earliest years. The time before her father became sick. She did not have very much of it. She remembered that he sometimes played “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind” on the harmonica, and then sang the refrain in a language that, in those years, she did not know. And once, she remembered, he had pulled the Great Dane up on its hind legs and danced with it. How she had laughed! The
man who danced with a dog was the man she had loved. This was before he shut himself in his office and before they got rid of the dog.

So the feeling of walking with a phalanx, she decided, also had something to do with the sunshine of the psyche before it is hacked apart.

Around the train car
wafted bits and pieces of the sort of conversation that always preceded a visit to the concentration camp memorial.

“Why did Hitler hate the Jews?”

“We’ll never know. Terrible.”

“One of them bullied him as a child maybe. You know, innocent kids’ stuff, but he took it the wrong way.”

“Do you think so?”

“Really, he was a weird man, wasn’t he.”

“What we’d call today a sociopath—”

“Like Pinochet.”

“Yes, like Pinochet.”

“But the Jews did have all the money, they never minded making a pretty penny off the Germans—”

“But I’ve heard that his own mother was Jewish—”

“Never mind that, I saw a documentary on BBC2 where you could see plain as day he was a homosexual.”

“Bah! He wasn’t any different than the rest of us. Anyone might do the same thing for power. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Say what you will, he was a sort of genius.”

“The Germans were anti-Semites from the ground up, going back a thousand years,” said another voice. “No sense looking at Hitler out of context.”

The quick rattling off of chestnuts never ceased to amaze Margaret. It was several British, Australians, and Americans who sat in a group of eight seats facing one another from across the aisle, while a Norwegian couple of middle age sat farther off, outside of the anglophone gathering. A group of Argentine students sat farther away still.

Margaret herself sat with her back to the anglophone group, in a seat where she could hear them but not see them. She was seething with dislike for a particular English businessman. It was because he wore a trench coat—an inadequate coat, given the extreme cold. Margaret knew who would suffer, whose eyes would glaze over with dilettante
misery. She knew it in advance. These people would be displeased with her tour no matter what she said, make her feel useless and inadequate, the tour into an endless plodding. And likely as not, she would attempt doggedly, with mounting sensationalism, to entertain them. And because she disliked the Englishman guiltily, for nothing but his coat, she felt the need to charm them all now, impress them, while still on the warm train.

So she popped up from behind her seat and addressed the sitting customers. “Hitler didn’t come from an anti-Semitic family,” she said loudly. “Here,” she said, and reached into her backpack. She pulled out
Mein Kampf
. She waved it for them to see, and it was as if she had drawn a lizard out of her pocket: most drew away in disgust, but her despised English businessman leaned forward with a grim smirk that seemed to say, Finally we are getting down to business.

She found the passage she wanted with little delay.

She read to them:

“You see?” Margaret said. “He didn’t learn anti-Semitism at home.”

“He learned it when he saw what the Jews were up to in Vienna,” said the businessman, smugly.

“And what was that?” asked Margaret.

“What was what?” he asked.

“What were the Jews up to in Vienna?” Surely this little man could hear the poison in her voice.

“Well, they had all the money, didn’t they now,” he said.

Margaret noticed with discomfort that when he spoke she was aware of his social class; she disliked British English for its blatancy; she didn’t want the information, saw it as a premature intimacy. Far better, she thought, to preserve, between strangers, a veneer of sameness.

“They didn’t have ‘all the money,’ ” Margaret said. “The idea is
ridiculous. Why do people still believe the garbage spread by the Nazis?” Margaret jerked her head. “If you look at the facts, neither German nor Austrian wealth was concentrated in the hands of the Jewish people; it is horrible how Nazi ideas persist even today.” Everyone looked at the ground and there was a heavy silence.

Margaret relented. She said, “But more important: how can you be sure Hitler hated the Jews?”

“Ha,” the man scoffed. “Oh, I think he must have. Eccentric guide we have here!” he said to the Australian couple across from him. “Isn’t she? Imagine Hitler, wanting to have tea with his Jewish friends? Is that what you’ll argue?”

“Hitler didn’t have to hate in order to destroy,” Margaret said. “He was evil—but evil doesn’t need any motivation.” She looked out the window of the train. “And people without hatred—are doing evil things everywhere.”

As soon as she had said it, this idea struck Margaret very hard. It ground into her. She applied it to herself very broadly.

But then she looked around, and all in a rush she seemed to see the faces of the customers before her as if for the first time. She told them brightly, as an addendum, that Hitler was a vegetarian. This was greeted with general disbelief. Theories of evil came and went. The train clacked northward.

When they got up
to the little town of Oranienburg, the wind whistled around the train as it left them behind, making a shriek that the businessman said sounded like an incendiary bomb blowing down from a plane. The remark was met with appreciation.

Margaret marched them down the main street, past the gun shop and the florist, avoiding the proprietress of the sausage and beer house, who trailed Margaret in hopes of convincing her to bring the group back to her establishment for lunch.

They walked the same route along which prisoners were once force-marched, all the way down the main road, then out of the center of town. Many of the buildings along the street were abandoned, with vacant lots overgrown.

All around was a winter silence. The cold was so thick it was difficult to breathe. No one spoke, and the silence became tighter. They walked in an involuntary single file down the sidewalk covered with
ice, and turned into the last street before the camp. The houses were small. Each one had a tiny garden, enclosed, still, and frost-covered, laden with ornaments; a sundial here and a gnome there. A small dog came and pressed its bugging eyes to a parlor’s picture window. When he began to bark machine-gun-like at them, everyone jumped, even though the sound was muffled through the glass. The trees on the street were old and much taller than the one-story houses, these houses both neat and run-down, in the East German way, the windows made into proscenia with plastic lace curtains.

A chorus of cries began to echo in the distance then. No one knew exactly what it was. The sound was horrible. The sounds became louder. As they neared one of the oldest trees, a tree whose roots had piled up the sidewalk, the cries were all around them, and Margaret and the customers looked up. A colony of crows was gathered in the frozen tree, branches spread in the skeleton of a canopy. Between them, the birds were fighting over the carcass of a large white bird. Some of the black birds had bloody beaks, and the snowy white bird’s feathers, as it was dismembered, became pinker. Margaret felt a drop of moisture on her face, and touched it. On her finger was a spot of blood, fallen from the tree above her. The group of tourists shuddered and skittered toward the camp hastily, like game pieces being slid into a box.

Inside the camp
the coniferous trees were low, and the sky tilted in an arch. The natural world made way for an open dreamscape, a geometry of cryogenics. Sachsenhausen, built by the SS in the childish shape of an isosceles triangle, with long walls rushing off to pine and guard-tower vanishing points, was a pedagogical place, giving lessons in sharp draftsmanship. The few barracks still standing smelled of paint, mildew, and ammonia; they called to the visitor for inspection, these lone seashells on the beach of weeds. This day, at Sachsenhausen, the great open space was shining with melted snow that had, in the extreme cold, refrozen, giving the open tundra a glassy surface reflecting the blue of the broad sky. Just inside the walls, Margaret noticed that underneath the snow there were mouse tunnels. That is to say, the snow was several inches thick under the ice, and the mice had tunneled inside it. The mice traced vaporous lines under the ice.

The first stop was the roll-call square. Here, Margaret told the tourists, thousands of prisoners had assembled every morning and every evening. The coarse, sandy earth of the Brandenburg mark was stretched flat, stamped down ten thousand years ago by receding glaciers and sixty years ago by a cement wheel rolled about by prisoners. Today it was a shining mirror in its cloak of ice. The beech trees inside the camp were large, and their black branches stark in the cold. Margaret spoke of many things—margarine rations, suicide rates among the prisoners.

Jakob Zhugashvili walked into the electric fence around the perimeter of the camp just here, in order to end his life. Margaret’s head, as she spoke, seemed weighted. It dropped toward the ground. Looking at her feet, her eyes grew hotter despite the freezing cold, and her vision buzzed. All of a sudden, here at the camp, everything seemed dreadful. But why was her head so hot? Her eyes were itching. When she looked up, the sky was white.

She looked down again. Under her boots, a woman’s face glowed in the ice. The reflection of the skeleton trees flashed, and the woman down inside appeared bound; it was as though the trees had dug into her. The woman’s hair was chalk-like and her eyes dark.

Margaret reached under her coat and gripped the flesh of her stomach. She pinched hard. She could not afford to lose her sanity here, not while trying to give the tour. She must not. She looked up into the sky.

She led the group to the old infirmary buildings. The customers straggled along behind her in silence. The wind rose, and it sounded like ocean waves drawing back from the shore.

This tour had never been an easy one for Margaret. Early on, she had become accustomed to lying at several points along the way. Or, not lying exactly—omitting, underemphasizing, and sometimes overemphasizing. She was conscious that she did it, but that is not to say she did it deliberately. She had never planned the disinformation in advance. The “lies” had developed over time of their own accord. In each case, it happened like this: one day she looked at the group, looked into their faces, and instead of saying what she had planned to say, something new came out of her mouth, something more pleasing. Because we are creatures of routine and the lie usually went over well (she had only gone over the limit of her customers’ credulity once or twice), on the next occasion it came out reflexively again. She had a guilty conscience about it, but at a certain point it became physically difficult to say anything else—as difficult as doing a backbend after
years of stiffness. Then too, it hadn’t started as artlessly as she made herself believe. It had begun because she couldn’t bear the discomfort of trying to tell things in an unshaped way. How much better to make a good tour of it.